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component. By focusing on gear and the role of the trap for data collection, tradition becomes

less inclusive of the local community context and local harvest, processing and trade of tuna.

Secondly, a spatial and typological relationship is formed, which previously was based on

trade, empires and types of gear but now is based on use of gear (trap) defined as traditional

in contrast to industrial fisheries. This takes place in a politically and culturally diverse region

of the Mediterranean, grouping together the last surviving traps of Italy, Spain, Morocco and

Portugal. This is what Mol and Law call “regional spaces”, ‘in which objects are clustered

together and boundaries are drawn around each cluster’ (1994, p. 643). These kinds of spaces

supress difference and promote uniform treatment of the objects within them (Bear & Eden

2008, p. 490). Traps of the Mediterranean Sea become similar objects and their cultural

particularities condensed. Indeed this invocation of tradition involves the construction of a

biocultural regionalism that brings together distant and diverse spaces and their histories,

techniques and cultures. Each shares in common basic technical principles of intercepting and

capturing bluefin with a fixed net trap. Each shares some history through technique and

knowledge sharing and also through trade. Nonetheless they are diverse spaces and include

diverse ecological and cultural contexts, which can be erased in the act of banding them

together within the contemporary fishery regime.

This alliance is only relevant in relation to industrial fisheries, in fact its purpose

seems to be to position the traps in opposition to and distinct from industrial fishing. Such an

opposition can be analysed through Mol and Law’s (1994) notion of “network spaces”, which

‘are not defined by boundaries [unlike regional spaces] but by relationships’ (in Bear & Eden

2008, p. 490). In the case of Atlantic bluefin, network spaces are made through regional

TACs. ICCAT allocates one TAC for the Mediterranean Sea and one for the Atlantic Ocean,

and the TACs are then distributed as quota among nation states and then among the nation

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state’s fisheries . Quota, as a central device of fishery policy and bluefin management,

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